This is a guest post by Antonio D. Matos, a soon-to-be student at Columbia University’s SIPA focused on East-West integration and exploring Social Entrepreneurship. Check him out on Twitter and Medium.

People are always asking, what’s a social enterprise? Wikipedia calls it “an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being, rather than maximizing profits for external shareholders.” Social leaders are mission-driven, where success is measured by impact on society. Businesses, operating to sustain themselves, on the other hand focus on the short-term financial return, and in effect have had the biggest impact on society. Between the nonprofit and for-profit worlds exists a dimension where maximum value can be created – and sustained – to benefit stakeholders on all dimensions.

Service-oriented Jack Ma preaches a customer first, employees second, and shareholders third approach. Unfortunately, valuations today are effectively measured by the financial return, regardless of an unmeasured social and environmental impact that that company can project to have. As time seems to move ever so faster, such short-term thinking lends to most of the global challenges all organizations faced yesterday: global inequality, climate change, IP disputes, and the countless others. Technology companies, often struggling with monetization, with their high-flown valuations, often forget the responsibility endowed to them by default or not.

Jack’s said that “when you have a couple million dollars, you’re a rich guy; 10-20 million dollars, that’s capital; over 100 million dollars, now that’s social resources.” Platform economics hasn’t always been successful in China. Wokai, the first P2P microfinance platform in China and working to alleviate poverty in the West, ran into funding and regulatory roadblocks and couldn’t sustain. Watsi, the healthcare crowdfunding platform, is however taking a global approach to denting poverty, and has even attracted funding from Tencent. If social resources can be better used than the government, as Jack has said, then insofar as impact can be measured, and later culturally accepted, there remains much demand to be supplied.

“Think about the social problems you can solve” –马云

This article is cross-posted at Medium. Thanks to Antonio D. Matos for contributing the piece. If you’re interested in writing for InnoSpring, please contact me at russ [AT] innospringus.com. Follow InnoSpring on Twitter and WeChat (QR code below), and sign up for our Newsletter to keep up with all the latest content on cross-border innovation.